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Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 19:55:58 -0700
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From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: SLS: The Hamaker Hypothesis (1 of 7)
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What is Going on with the Climate?
by
Gregory Alexander
July 20, 1990
What is going on with the climate? We saw swarms of tornados in
the Midwest last Spring, more than I have ever seen in my
lifetime. What about those 100 mph wind storms in Europe last
winter? They did a billion dollars worth of damage to the
infrastructure. I have never heard of such a thing. Have you?
Remember Hurricane Gilbert last year. Those 200 mph winds set
another record. In the last 10 years, we have seen climate
records broken all over the world: record heat, record drought,
record cold, record floods. What gives? It does not seem
possible that the weather can be going in so many different
directions at the same time. We hear a great deal of talk about
the Greenhouse Effect. Some experts say yes, such as NASA's
James Hansen. Other experts say no, such as Sherwood Idso of
USDA. Is there any hope of sorting out this climate crisis when
the experts themselves are confused?
Thanks to Don Weaver and Larry Ephron at People for a Future
(415-524-2700), we now have the means to understand the current
climate crisis. They have produced an excellent videotape that
explains how and why the climate has become so very unstable.
Incidentally, this is not the first time in the history of the
world that there has been severe, rapid and catastrophic change
in world weather patterns. Pollen analysis of ancient lake bed
deposits by Genevieve Woillard (Nature, 281, Oct. 18) makes it
clear that the onset of an ice age can be very abrupt: less than
100 years and maybe as short as 25 years.
Understanding this change is a challenge. A psychological
problem arises from that fact that climate change is enormously
out-of-scale, in both space and time, for the normal human mind
to comprehend. The last ice age in geological history (about
10,000 years ago) is something too remote to be relevant in our
post-nuclear, Perestroika age of political upheaval. On the
other hand, one might ask, is there some reason why Perestroika
is occurring now, along with the wacky weather?
Even though we remain unsure to what extent human events change
the weather, the weather certainly does change human events. Has
a blizzard ever ruined your winter ski trip? Has a drought ever
halted your farm income. Has a tornado ever wiped out your town?
Has a hurricane ever forced you to evacuate your home? Even if
you are not a serious student of geology, some things are
certain: there have been earthquakes in the past and there will
be earthquakes in the future. Likewise, there have been ice ages
in the past, and there will be ice ages in the future. The
problem is that the future is now.
Even though the geological evidence for the ice ages has been
with us for a long time, many of the great minds of European
science were unable to explain the reason for their regular
occurrence. They examined the rocks and fossils. They noted
that the ice ages occurred at regular intervals lasting about
90,000 years, whereas the warm, inter-glacial periods lasted
only 10,000 years. From a geological point of view, an ice age
is the "normal" state of the Earth, compared to relatively
"short" inter-glacial period.
These many great scientific minds, however, never identified the
true cause of the ice ages. Until 1982, no scientist had a
theory that could explain both the beginning and the end of the
ice ages. What modern scientist has the long-term global view of
climate change? A climatologist, a geologist, a meteorologist, a
glaciologist? Our situation is similar to the situation of the
four blind Hindus. One Hindu holds the tail of the elephant and
says that it is a rope. One Hindu runs into the side of the
elephant and says that he has hit a wall. One Hindu stubs his
toe and says that it is most definitely a tree. The fourth Hindu
grabs the trunk and says he has found a hose. Whom to believe?
Obviously, no one.
Enter John Hamaker, a retired mechanical engineer, known for his
multi-disciplinary approaches to solving problems. Hamaker cured
himself of a number of degenerative diseases by using fresh,
organic vegetables. This experience led him to study agriculture
and soil science. In 1983, Hamaker came upon a small book, Bread
from Stones, published by a German named Julius Hensel. Hensel
found that grinding a wide variety of stones to a powder, and
adding this powder to the soil with organic compost, produced
dramatic crop yields and very hearty plants.
I have replicated this finding in my home garden. The longer I
use mixed rock dust, the better the soil and the stronger the
plants. I have waited two years to write this, to be sure of
myself. Two citrus trees, stunted to thumb-sized nubs during a
week of winter frost in 1988, are now 4 feet high with thick
growth. Is this even possible without chemical fertilizers? The
answer is found in the soil microbes. Micro-organisms in the
soil feed on the small mineral particles of the weathered rocks,
and the trees feed on the microbes in the soil. Thus, the
microbes feed the trees.
I have grown healthy plants in a pan of soil. Then I sterilized
the soil by heating it to 200 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes.
After allowing the soil to cool, I replanted the soil with
seedlings. Although they were carefully watered, the seedlings
remained stunted and eventually died. Chemical fertilizers
provide only a few mineral supplements in pre-digested form to
plants. Dust, ground from a wide variety of rocks, provides all
the minerals that promote an abundance of micro-organisms to feed
plant life. Using fertilizers on your trees is similar to
feeding pabulum and steroids to your children. The result in
both cases is not bigger and stronger, but bigger and weaker.
The healthful effects of mixed rock dust were rediscovered quite
accidentally in Austria some years ago. When engineers built a
highway bridge over a gorge in the Austrian forest, their work
resulted in dusting the trees below with mixed gravel dust. A
year later, the trees below the bridge were lush and hearty --
a mystery to some, but not John Hamaker.
As far as we know, John Hamaker was the first to discover the
interrelationship of the soil, the trees, and the climate. What
precisely is his theory? Briefly, the trees are responsible for
inhaling carbon dioxide from the air and combining it with water,
during the daylight process of photosynthesis, to produce
carbohydrates: food, fuel, and building materials. Wood, peat,
coal, and oil all keep enormous amounts of carbon out of the
atmosphere, and their production by trees during photosynthesis
releases back to the atmosphere something very useful to animal
life -- oxygen!
The plants have made it possible for us to be here. If we do not
improve the quality of life for trees on the planet, it will not
be possible for us to live here either. On the other hand, if we
reforest and spread pulverized rock dust on soils of old growth
trees, new growth trees, and agricultural crops, we will become
smarter and stronger, eat better quality food and breath more
oxygen.
And what about the Greenhouse Effect? Larry Ephron has made the
following contributions to this debate:
How long will it take to reduce atmospheric CO2 from its
current 355 parts per million to a safe level of 270 ppm?
1 ppm of atmospheric CO2 = 2.13 gigatons (Gt) of carbon
(1 gigaton = 1 billion tons)
355 - 270 = 85 ppm x 2.13 = 181 Gt carbon we must remove
Reducing Fossil Fuel Burning:
This would not remove carbon from the atmosphere, only slow
the rate at which it continues to increase. With great
motivation, we could reduce fossil fuel burning 50% within 5
years, which would slow the increase by 2.5 Gt carbon/year.
As it is phased in, however, it would reduce the increase by
an average of only 1.25 Gt carbon/year.
Stopping Deforestation:
This would not remove carbon either, only slow its increase.
George Woodwell of the Woods Hole Research Center estimates
that stopping deforestation would reduce the increase by 1
to 4 Gt of carbon per year. We can conservatively estimate
the benefits of stopping deforestation at about 2.5 Gt of
carbon/year.
Reforestation:
This would remove carbon from the atmosphere, by storing it
in the fibers of new trees. Roger Sedjo, a forestry expert
at Resources for the Future, has estimated that planting
fast-growing trees worldwide on an area the size of the
United States would remove the equivalent of all the CO2
currently being produced by both fossil fuel burning and
deforestation, or about 7.5 Gt of carbon/year.
Remineralizing Forests:
Research shows that remineralizing forest soils with finely
ground mixed rock dust is likely, on average, to double the
growth rate of trees and their consumption of atmospheric
carbon. Reminerlizing newly planted forests of fast-growing
trees is likely to remove an additional 7.5 Gt of
carbon/year from the atmosphere.
Existing forests currently process about 100 Gt of
carbon/year. By increasing their growth rate, remineralizing
only one-fourth of existing forests is likely to remove at
least an additional 25 Gt of carbon/year.
Remineralizing Phytoplankton:
John Martin at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories identifies
ocean areas where upwelling provides an abundance of
nutrients and the growth of phytoplankton is limited by a
scarcity of iron (and perhaps other minerals). He estimates
that remineralizing these areas (only 18% of the global
oceans) with finely ground iron ore would rapidly increase
phytoplankton growth and thus remove about 4 Gt of
carbon/year.
Summary:
The total of all these means of removing carbon from the
atmosphere is 44 Gt of carbon/year. That means we could
remove the 181 Gt of excess carbon within only 4.1 years.
But if we do not accomplish the difficult jobs of halving
fossil fuel burning and stopping deforestation, atmospheric
carbon would still increase during those 4.1 years by 7.5
Gt/year, or another 30.7 Gt. So, we would not catch up and
remove all the excess carbon in less than five years.
Reforestation and remineralization are relatively easy and
painless. But if we hesitate now, our greatest efforts may
soon be too late.
Now, finally, the weather is beginning to make sense. The soil,
the trees, and the atmosphere are an integrated whole. We are no
longer blind followers of blind experts. Even if political
leaders, almost all of whom know less about agriculture and
forestry than you do now, continue to perpetrate confusion around
the Greenhouse Effect, we know what to do: reforest and spread
rock dust.
And what if we continue our folly? What if we continue to permit
our forests to burn and die? What if we continue to poison
ourselves and our soil with chemical fertilizers and ever
stronger pesticides? We will become weaker and more addicted to
drugs and junk food, as we try in vain to make ourselves feel
good as we degenerate into various disease states.
What will happen to the earth's atmosphere? The Greehouse Effect
occurs mainly in the tropics, just as Hamaker predicted. Greater
heat trapping evaporates more water, which circulates toward the
North and South Poles, resulting in more clouds, more snow and
colder polar temperatures. The earth, as a physical system,
maintains thermodynamic equilibrium: if the equator heats up,
the poles will cool off.
Don't take my word for it. Ask biologist Robert Jeffries who has
been observing the Canadian Snow Geese. From 1975 to 1990, the
spring snow melt line of their habitat has moved 150 miles south.
Now, all the migrating birds are competing over the same norther
habitat -- a narrow band moving steadily South.
People are going to move south, too. The average snowfall in
Valdez, Alaska has increased from 300 inches in the last few
years to 500 inches. As the temperature differences between the
poles and the equatorial zone increase, violent weather fronts
will move faster and more frequently from North to South. Life
in the so-called "temperate zone", where most of us live, is
going to be as much fun as jogging back and forth across the
freeway during rush hour, with kids and groceries in tow.
The weather is already getting very nasty. As any meteorologist
can tell you, wide temperature differences on a continental scale
mean violent weather -- tornadoes over land, hurricanes over
water. What is the sense of debating whether the average world
temperature has gone up or down a half a degree, when anyone can
see the increasing violence of the weather?
We see in the United States, with alarming frequency, that our
own food crops cannot be protected from hail, floods, drought,
early frost, late frost, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The drought
that knocked out the Southeast crops in 1988 illustrates the
pattern of heating near the Equator. To the North, political
upheaval in the Soviet Union is caused, in part, by economic
competition between producing and consuming areas. The
inefficient system of centralized bureaucratic distribution is
being dismantled because there is not enough food to distribute.
As we enter an era of massive demineralized forest burning and
crop failures, the Soviets, who are almost entirely farther North
than our Canadian border, have already entered the Ice Age.
NO political system can expect to survive if it does not adapt at
once to the natural requirements of soil remineralization and
reforestation. The monies spent on a few bombers, an aircraft
carrier, and a nuclear power plant, could easily do the job.
# # #
========================================================================
Paul Andrew Mitchell : Counselor at Law, federal witness
B.A., Political Science, UCLA; M.S., Public Administration, U.C. Irvine
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